RPCV4EA Leadership Team Member Mike Roman (RPCV Kiribati 2000-2002) selected the poem below, “Our Reality” By Maria K. Lambourne of Kiribati, to highlight the impact of climate change and displacement on this small island nation.
“Our Reality”
By Maria K. Lambourne
The Song of The Frigate is one that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was little. It tells the story of how the Kiribati national bird and icon lost her home to the ocean after coming back from foraging. She called out, “Rise up Kiribati, hear my calling, hear my song. Where are you?”, but the frigate bird never found its nest.
This story embodies the people of Kiribati and how we are singing our own songs for the world to hear. So they know that climate change is really happening and that it’s happening to our home. We are the frigate bird, and it’s scary to acknowledge the fact that our nest will be washed away by the waves eventually. When that day comes, that is when we as a people will start losing our identity. We won’t have the safety of our nest to keep our families together because we will be forced to leave, to prematurely spread our wings and fly into and unfamiliar world that is not home. And bit by bit, we’ll start losing our culture, our skills, our language: the things that define who we are as Ikiribati people.
This is climate change.
This is reality.
When Kiribati is gone, our future generations will never have the same feeling we get when we think of home because “home” will never be the same. They’ll never get the chance to experience the things that we’ve only ever experienced on the many Kiribati islands. They’ll never get the chance to see that special spot where our President would stand every 12th of July for our National Day, or the simpler things like the familiar ocean breeze by the beach outside your house. They’ll only know these things through the stories that we tell because, in the end, Kiribati will just be a memory.
This is the reality and I have accepted it. I have accepted that there’ll be a day in the near future that we won’t ever see Kiribati, that tiny little dot on the map, again. I believe that climate change is real, and it is affecting my country and my people.
Maria Lambourne is the daughter of Tessie Lambourne (Member of Parliament) and David Lambourne (Chief Justice) in Kiribati, where Mike served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Mike Roman (RPCV Kiribati 2000-2002) is a climate activist, author, and lecturer. His love for Kiribati stems from his Peace Corps service; he continues to work in humanizing climate change from the frontlines, inlcuding co-creating the social media platform Humans of Kiribati and informing the film Anote’s Ark, a 2018 Sundance selection by Matthieu Rytz. Mike is co-Chair of RPCV4EA’s Peace Corps Action Team.